[lit-ideas] Re: Israel's Invasion Pretext UnderFire
- From: "Andy Amago" <aamago@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 26 Jul 2006 22:31:02 -0400
Except that Israel's moral standing is shaky. It would be like saying the
Mexicans have a moral right to take over California. That's what this is
based in, even if the origins are forgotten. My suggestion would be for
Israel to say, look, we panicked after WWII and didn't act out of good
judgment. Can we now make reparations and coexist somehow and improve both
our lives. Instead, they keep thinking that they'll find peace at the end
of a gun. It's a contradiction in terms. That's what I said once before,
imagine if Israel offered to feed the hungry children. Instead, they
destroy a country. That's not moral standing. Even so, I sure hope the
militants don't start streaming into Lebanon, what's left of it.
> [Original Message]
> From: John Wager <john.wager1@xxxxxxxxxxx>
> To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> Date: 7/26/2006 1:43:03 PM
> Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: Israel's Invasion Pretext UnderFire
>
> Stan Spiegel wrote:
>
> > Omar conveniently cites:
> > "Israeli forces have gone on to kill over 370 innocent Lebanese
civilians
> > (compared to 34 killed on Israel's side) while
> > displacing hundreds of thousands more."
> >
> > As Omar knows, Hezbollah has enmeshed itself into the civilian
> > structure of Lebanese life: hides guns and all sorts of assault
> > weapons in children's bedrooms and apartment houses. It is Hezbollah
> > that recognizes no limits -- and to fight Hezbollah it becomes very
> > difficult without hurting some civilians.
>
> Perhaps the point was that it was both immoral AND self-destructive to
> bomb so many Hezbollah targets when they were so closely embedded in the
> civilian population. Back in the Vietnam war, a general is reported to
> have said "We had to destroy the village in order to save it." The
> calculus of human death and suffering is never easy to make, but I
> personally think Israel fell into a Hezbollah trap in deciding to place
> the amount of civilian suffering at so low a priority. Yes Israel needs
> to reduce the danger to its citizens, but doing so in a way that
> temporarily relieves the number of rockets fired while increasing the
> number of volunteer rocket firers seems counter-productive. The U.S.
> may be slowly learning this lesson in Iraq--It does no good to eliminate
> a "threat" if you do so in a way that increases the number of people who
> will threaten you in the future as a result.
>
> Israel seems to have decided that just bombing the targets from the air
> was not enough to stop the firings, and that a certain amount of ground
> action is also needed. Someone in the Israeli air force probably was
> arguing for using FEWER bombs precisely because they would probably not
> work, and somebody else in Israel decided that despite the lack of
> chance for success, the number of civilian casualties should NOT prevent
> the bombing from taking place. This seems both immoral and
> counter-productive to Israel's long-term security. I suspect the reason
> that unnamed Israeli made the decision to bomb those targets was the
> same reason American military planners do the same thing--to avoid
> future military casualties in a ground operation. But again, like the
> U.S., Israel may (unfortunately) discover that their actions have
> produced more hostility and more danger to the troops they sent in that
> those troops would have been subject to if Israel had not been so
> cavalier about its bombing targets.
>
>
> --
> -------------------------------------------------
> "Never attribute to malice that which can be
> explained by incompetence and ignorance."
> -------------------------------------------------
> John Wager john.wager1@xxxxxxxxxxx
> Lisle, IL, USA
>
>
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